Google’s new Near Match could have a big impact on advertisers

Google is preparing to move a beta initiative of Near Match to the mainstream. Near Match is designed to “enable you to safely extend the reach of your Exact and Phrase Match keywords to cover plural, misspelling, close rewrite, abbreviation and acronym variants only”.

Google has suggested it leads to a 6.5% increase in click volume and a 9.8% increase in impression volume. This could be appealing for marketers, but Ad Age‘s Chris Copeland asks at what cost?

“If knowledge is power then the introduction of a new unknown once again changes the rules of the game,” he says. According to Copeland, when testing the new Near Match type for select Group M clients, an increase in impressions was found – but costs per click also increased 13%. “This is likely because advertisers were suddenly having bids, established by knowledge-based decisions against a specific keyword, assigned to variations of those terms that had an unknown value.”

“From a user standpoint the game doesn’t change,” Copeland continued. “Google continues to deliver relevant results and ads that match what they likely meant. For advertisers, the data set has changed and the intelligence has to be rebuilt. In the meantime, there’s a price to be paid with Google’s new change and unlike kids who can decide not to play the game, brands won’t have that option.”

Read the full Ad Age article here.